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By Ceecee Wong
Launching April 13 in Japan’s Maebashi city, PicTrée is an Inspect-to-Earn DePIN-integrated game that will enable video-gamers to help TEPCO mitigate a labor shortage of utility inspectors.
Decentralized physical infrastructure networks, or DePIN for short, are one of the most exciting developments in the blockchain and Web3 space. For companies that operate heavy physical infrastructure, it can deliver decentralized labor shortage solutions to aging infrastructure maintenance. By allocating various company tasks to remote management by a crowd-sourced community, it is possible to open up new possibilities that were never available in the past.
So far, this technology has primarily been applied in digital-adjacent industries, such as IT, cloud computing and telecommunications. However, a new innovation by popular global GameFi platform PlayMining now opens up a unique DePIN-integrated solution to almost any kind of company.
Introducing PicTrée: Capture the Current and Contribute to Society
Developed by PlayMining in partnership with TEPCO Power Grid — Japan’s largest electric power company, and the fourth-largest in the world — PicTrée is a free-to-play mobile game that encourages players to go out on foot into their local neighborhoods, Pokemon Go-style. Players join one of three teams and battle to connect power lines on the game map by photographing TEPCO’s electric power infrastructure such as steel towers, utility poles, manholes and handholes. The “Inspect-to-Earn” game rewards winning teams with Amazon gift cards and PlayMining’s DEAPcoin ($DEP) tokens.
Why would TEPCO want video gamers to take pictures of their power poles, you might ask? Well, they couldn’t find anyone else to do it. TEPCO has had difficulty finding enough utility pole inspectors to maintain their expansive power assets amid an ongoing global labor shortage crisis. And they aren’t the only ones: up to four-fifths of companies all around the world may be suffering from a lack of talent, according to a 2023 report by ManpowerGroup, with a large percentage of companies affected coming from heavy industries — like electric power utilities.
Thanks to the power of decentralization (and a bit of ingenuity on PlayMining’s part), a decentralized community of gamers are now able to step up to fill this labor demand and help maintain the public infrastructure in their local communities. PlayMining calls this new concept “Gamified Work”. It’s a fun video game that encourages social good, and it’s creating a bit of a buzz in Japanese media and among the general populace who are excited to see new technology solving a social problem.
PicTrée is launching on April 13, initially only in Japan’s centrally located Maebashi city. The game will run a demonstration test across the city until June 29, after which it will be tweaked for deployment in other regions of Japan. PlayMining is also organizing an event with five Maebashi universities on May 4 and 5 to put the game through even more rigorous testing.
TEPCO commented that they hope to create new value for their power assets. DEA co-founder and co-CEO Kozo Yamada encouraged people from all over Japan to come down to Maebashi and participate in a ground-breaking game that may have the power to change the world.
#GamifiedWork Being Integrated Across Multiple Industries
PlayMining has more such DePIN-integrated Gamified Work projects in development, such as a game that rewards players for remotely controlling waste sorting robots installed in real waste management facilities in Japan. This helps fill a labor shortage in the waste management industry. Other projects address such social problems such as climate change, natural disasters, unemployment among disabled people, animals in need, urban decline, difficulties with inheritance and poor quality of life for elderly people.
The wider cryptocurrency marketplace noticed PlayMining’s bold move, too. The company’s $DEP token rebounded immediately following the announcement of their new Gamified Work business model on Oct. 25, 2024. Since then, the token has grown in both market cap and price, placing it among the leading tokens in the ongoing GameFi rally that kicked off at around the same time.
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